Gift of Hope : Survival of Young Crash Victim Comforts Family

In the wake of their tragic year, 14-year-old Barbara Du Bois and her family have found comfort in simple miracles this holiday season.

The young girl was given only a 10% chance of surviving a devastating June auto accident that killed her sister and two other girls. But she was released from the hospital last month, a holiday gift that has given her family a much-needed injection of hope for the new year.

Barbara can walk the few steps to the mailbox in front of the mobile home she and her grandmother share, but for longer distances needs a wheelchair. Her injuries also left her with a diminished mental capacity--she is now doing second-grade schoolwork. She has just returned to the weekly church group meetings that were a focal point in her life before the accident.

Seeing Barbara in this condition has been hard on her grandmother and guardian, Mary McWilliams, especially during the holidays.

“You cry about it, you worry about it,” McWilliams said. But the joy she derives from Barbara’s progress has made it possible for McWilliams to partially forget her troubles.

“Everything else,” McWilliams said, “is trivial.”

Before the accident, Barbara was an eighth-grade student at Canyon High School in Santa Clarita. She was so close to her 15-year-old sister, JoKema, that they shared a bedroom even though her grandmother’s house had an extra bedroom.

The two girls attended weekly youth group gatherings at Canyon Country Assembly of God Church. The sisters and three friends were on their way home from one of those meetings on June 1 when tragedy struck.

JoKema, who had reportedly taken the keys to her grandmother’s 1986 Chrysler LaBarron without permission, was weaving the car back and forth on Seco Canyon Road in Saugus to amuse passenger Jesika Noell, 3. The car drifted across the center divider and slammed head-on into two oncoming vehicles.

JoKema, Jesika, and one of Barbara’s best friends, Gena Watkinson, 15, were killed in the crash. Barbara and Alicia Acevedo, 14, were hospitalized in critical condition, though Alicia was released several weeks later.

Barbara underwent several surgeries, but her face could not be entirely reconstructed. Her cheekbones and nose are flattened, and she wears makeup to cover a number of scars on her face. Her speech, though understandable, is slurred.

Glimpses of the spunky youngster Barbara was before the accident are now starting to resurface, and at her best she doesn’t seem much different than any other teen-ager. Clad in a white Looney Tunes sweat shirt, she chatted enthusiastically about the Christmas presents she had made for her family and about hopes of working with children when she grows up--a goal she had before the accident.

“I’ve always loved little kids,” she said.

But good humor sometimes disappears, replaced by sudden anger or confusion.

“She’s aware that she is not like she used to be,” McWilliams said. “It’s something right now that for her is too stressful to think or talk about.”

The frustration and pain has at times caused Barbara to struggle with doctors and curse at those around her, said both McWilliams and Barbara’s 22-year-old sister, Anna.

Barbara says she doesn’t remember the outbursts, especially insulting her grandmother.

“That bugs me,” she said, looking bewildered. “I would never call her a bad name. Did I call Anna bad names?”

“You called everyone bad names,” her sister told her gently.

Mention of the nurses a few minutes later brought out Barbara’s ire, sparked by tales of having to be physically restrained while undergoing hospital treatment.

“That wasn’t an accident, I scratched them,” she retorted, prompting embarrassed laughter from her sister. “They hurt me.”

Church and family members have prayed vigilantly for Barbara’s recovery, said Ralph Milliken, youth pastor at the church from which the girls were returning the night of the accident. He recalled the first few days, when Barbara’s prognosis was bleak.

“The doctor at one point said she only had minutes to live, that all her vital signs were going down,” he said. “I started praying with her family and friends, and about half an hour later the doctor came out and said, ‘She pulled out of it. I don’t know what happened. She was in a nose dive and she pulled out of it.’ ”

Once it became apparent Barbara would survive, doctors at Northridge Hospital Medical Center predicted she would require 24-hour-a-day, lifelong care.

“She is more functional (than predicted), but she still can’t be left alone,” McWilliams said. “If you just put her in a bathtub and leave her alone, two hours later she’s still in the bathtub.”

But church members have faith that Barbara will again surprise her doctors. “I have a feeling she will recover fully,” Milliken said.

McWilliams isn’t quite that optimistic yet, but she allows herself to believe it is possible Barbara could once again be the perky, relatively untroubled granddaughter she knew before the accident.

“There have been people damaged as badly as she’s been damaged and made a full recovery,” McWilliams said. “It’s a miracle. She’s already a miracle to have made it this far.”